The Time of the Wolf
by Seaborn W. Deadman
Summary: Rose is expecting, but there are unforeseen consequences in bearing a timelord's child. Rose/10.5 Unfinished three or four shot, will be completed soon :)
1. Chapter 1

Rose woke up crying. Instinctively, she pressed a hand to her round belly. All was well. She lay in silence in the dark, breathing deeply and aware that she was not the only one up.

"Doctor," she choked, and buried her face in his chest.

"Hey, shhh…" he soothed. He switched on the bedside lamp, casting a comforting glow over their small but cosy bedroom, and sat up, adjusting his wife in his arms accordingly. "The dreams again?"

"It's the same one, every time," she sniffled. "The big bad wolf, dark but burning bright, walking through the winds of time, beckoning to me…"

"Rose," The Doctor said, gently but firmly. "No human has ever before absorbed the time vortex. No human should be able to and live. It only makes sense there would be lingering aftereffects…"

"Yes, but if that's the case why didn't this start happening until just a few months ago?"

It seemed for once, The Doctor was at a loss for words. He didn't need them; Rose understood by the worried look on his face. For seemingly the first time since Rose had run off with a mad man in a blue box, The Doctor did not know the answer.

Still shaken, Rose didn't speak either, only curled up close against her Doctor. He in turn just held her and stroked her naturally wavy blonde hair.

"Doctor...am I going to be okay?" she eventually said.

"Hell will freeze over before I let anything happen to you," the Doctor whispered.

"But the wolf...it's in me, Doctor. You can't protect me from me."

"Rose Tyler, just you watch me," he vowed, drying her tears.

At times like this, it was so easy to forget there was another Doctor, out roaming the universe somewhere, with some other girl. Rose would always have a place in her heart for him, but she would never again love him like she did her husband. Her Doctor.

He laid a hand on her belly. "How's baby?"

"You try it sometime," Rose grimaced. "But he's worth it."

"You need all the rest you can get, try to get some sleep. Why don't I go make some hot milk?"

"Actually I was fancying some chamomile," Rose confessed.

Smiling, the Doctor kissed first her, then her belly, before padding barefoot off to the kitchen.

When the sound of his footsteps faded, Rose heaved herself out of bed. She slid into her pink slippers before creeping out; she knew the Doctor didn't like her getting out of bed without his help when she was on bed rest.

She made her way laboriously into the little TARDIS-blue room across the hall. The Doctor had painstakingly painted silver stars all over the ceiling, and it was Rose who had made the mobile that hung over the cot in the corner; handcrafted little TARDISes and stars and planets, spinning slightly in the draft from the window. Rose knelt at the foot of the cot and just rested her head against the bars, breathing deeply.


	2. Chapter 2

Rose grew steadily worse. She was weak and frail, which was of course standard for a pregnancy, but the Doctor began to worry when her appetite began to wane. Soon, she was vomiting nearly everything she ate, and began to lose the will to eat and drink altogether, and the Doctor had to coax her into nibbling soda crackers and water. On such insufficient diet, she grew gaunter and paler by the day. Both The Doctor and Doctor Williams, the perinatologist, began to fear for the health of both Rose and the baby. However, all signs indicated it was a perfectly healthy, normal child, but this was puzzling and almost more a worry than a comfort. Logically, with Rose as sick as she was, it made no sense for the baby to be apparently doing so well.

One black Monday, it was raining, heavier than it had rained in a long time and it had been since Sunday. The Doctor trudged home from work, his converse getting filthy in the muddy puddles on the street, hunched over with his eyes set on the ground to shield his face from the wet bullets pelting down. Memories of his other self's years of TARDIS travel had left him uncomfortable driving a car, using such an ordinary human vehicle gave him an ache of longing for those time traveling years. It was days like this that he regretted this decision. He was off late from work; November was setting in, and with the winter chill came an outbreak of flu that left him with double the patients he usually had.

He paused at the corner he always dreaded to pass; with a heavy sigh he lifted his eyes to the lone police box that stood on the sidewalk. Not quite his TARDIS; the phone was real and the windows were the right size, and the blue was just barely off but it still pained him to see it. Somewhere there was another man, with his memories, his face, living the life he still missed. Dancing across the stars in that little blue box, saving the universe every day, and a really ridiculous amount of running. It was a mad coincidence that he had started his new life just a block away from this bitter monument to the days that never would be again, not for him. The box made him sad, yes. But he was happy with this life, too. It was a life that other man could never have. He had a job, a beautiful wife, a beautiful baby on the way...

Suddenly in his chest, perhaps about where his second heart should have been, he felt a heaviness; a sort of darkness there that he could not explain, and his thoughts leapt to Rose. Struck with the sudden impression there was something behind him, he turned. Just across the street, in a shop window, a shadowy lupine shape watched him, its burning gold eyes somehow cold and dark...and The Doctor somehow knew that the wolf wasn't really there. He broke into a run.

"ROSE?" he screamed upon arrival at their modest flat. He was met with a dead silence. The lights were all out and the house was freezing.

Some unexplainable force did not draw The Doctor to his and Rose's bedroom, but to the baby's room. He found Rose sprawled on the floor, eyes shut, taking shallow gasping breaths...in a pool of blood. But it was not a miscarriage, The Doctor could instantly see. It was vomit.

"Rose!" he shouted, gasping for air nearly as badly as she was. He knelt by her side, not caring about the blood soaking into his trousers, and laid a hand tenderly on her left breast, feeling for a heartbeat. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. It was far too slow. He panicked...and by some strange instinct, he checked the other side.

Weak, irregular and fluttering, a second rhythm pattered against The Doctor's hand. He nearly leapt back. Clasping a hand to his mouth, he choked back tears. He tried again...the rhythm was gone. Had he just imagined it?

Rose's eyelids fluttered open. Her breathing began to normalise. She did not speak, but weakly reached for the Doctor's hand. He caressing her small, soft fingers with his longer, rougher ones. Her hands were ice.

The Doctor was shaking, and it made him angry. It snapped himself back to his senses. He was being silly and fragile and his mind was playing tricks on him. He had to be strong for his Rose. More gingerly than he would have handled fine china, he lifted her alarmingly thin body from the ground and carried her to go wash the blood off.

Rose didn't speak as the Doctor bathed her, dressed her in soft linen, and laid her gently in bed; she only smiled. The Doctor was puzzled by this. "I love you," she whispered, and drifted to sleep.


End file.
